“It was a quieter night thanks to the resolute action of the police”. This was stated by the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, commenting on the fifth night of protests and urban violence following the police killing of the young Nahel Merzouk in Nanterre, in the Parisian banlieue. Clashes took place in Paris, in the Champs Elysées area, in Marseille, in Lyon, in Nice and in Rennes. A Renault dealership on fire in Brest. 719 were detained following the riots last night, according to the French Interior Ministry. The revolt also infected Switzerland where incidents and looting were reported in the center of Lausanne.
A speeding car was thrown into the home of the mayor of L’Haÿ-les-Rose, near Paris, during the night, and his wife and one of his two small children were injured. the mayor himself reported, while the Créteil prosecutor’s office confirmed to AFP that an investigation into attempted murder has been opened. The mayor, Vincent Jeanbrun, denounced in a statement posted on Twitter “an assassination attempt of unspeakable cowardice”, which occurred around 1:30 in the nightthis while “for three nights” the mayor had stopped in the town hall engaged in the emergency due to urban violence.
I am dynamic, connected and, according to the authorities, often “very young”. This is the profile of some of the protesters who in recent days in France have mourned “their anger” after the death of Nahel, 17, killed by a policeman during a check and marched through the country’s big cities. “The average age is 17,” Minister Darmanin said today, referring to the people arrested. Some of them have already started appearing in the courts of the Paris region. They are high school students, in vocational training, bartenders, young adults and many of them with a clean criminal record.
Macron cancels visit to Germany However, tensions remain very high in France, where Nahel’s funeral was held yesterday afternoon. Emotions at the mosque, where thousands demanded “justice for Nahel” but there were no incidents. Meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron “wants to stay in France in the next few days”, and has postponed the state visit to Germany which was scheduled for today. And in the meantime, send armored vehicles, helicopters, special units of the GIGN to Marseilles and Lyons, the two cities that suffered the most from the violence of the accidents on the night between Friday and Saturday, and which saw the flow of an unprecedented amount of reinforcements. Darmanin assured that he had “enormous vehicles” in the two cities “without depleting the rest”. So much so as to avoid declaring the curfew that many invoked. If in Paris and Ile-de-France we count on the trend that yesterday recorded a relatively calmer evening than the previous one, Lyon has seen “unprecedented” violence in the last 48 hours, as the local authorities have repeated.
France in revolt, police in riot gear on the streets of Paris
In Marseille, where the battle in the city center and at the Old Port has raged for hours, with hundreds set on fire, subways, trams and buses are already at a standstill. The Municipality has asked the managers of scooters and rental bikes to remove everything from the streets to prevent fires from being set. A reconnaissance aircraft will fly over the city throughout the night, indicating the location of the incidents to ground forces. In other cities, in the banlieues, but also in small towns hoping to escape the wave of anger and violence, you try to stem casseur and black bloc but the task seems difficult because the commandos of boys who leave to loot shops, start fires or simply devastate everything that comes within range are difficult to anticipate.
In the meantime, the body of young Nahel, in a white coffin, was buried in the Mont-Valérien cemetery in front of a few hundred family members, friends and peers from Nanterre. For the last farewell there were his grandmother and his mother, who raised him alone and who lately had seen him, like many of his friends in the banlieue, drop out of school and start earning his first money as a “rider”, dedicating himself in his free time to rap and motorbikes. And to his sporting passion for rugby.
Read the full article on ANSA.it
2023-07-02 08:13:00
#Revolt #France #quieter #night
